


Laundry

by kalirush



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-16
Updated: 2011-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-14 19:45:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 10,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalirush/pseuds/kalirush
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she was six, she met a man with a coat. When she was thirteen, she met a man who didn't age. When she was twenty, she met a man who couldn't die. Set in the interim between PotW and Torchwood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Six

I was six years old, the first time I met him. My parents ran a laundry in a little town in Florida, and it was August. The air was hot and wet, and he came in just before closing wearing the huge wool coat he wanted them to clean, and the heat be damned. He flirted with my mother, and she giggled like a girl and disappeared into the back room. He shook my father’s hand, and chatted with him in an easy way that was somehow outside of my experience of how grownup men talked to each other, and then he pulled jellybeans out of my nose for me.

He needed the coat the next day, and my father stayed up well past my bedtime fixing it for him. And, you should understand, my father never worked late for any customer- “not even the Governor himself!” he used to say, as a roundabout way of bragging that Governor Collins had stopped at our store on the campaign trail once, and had my father clean his suit and two of his ties.


	2. Thirteen

The second time I met him, he bought me a piece of pie. I was thirteen years old, and fancied myself very grown up. Old enough to hang out where the other teenagers did, anyhow. Clearly, now that I had a ‘teen’ at the end of my age, I belonged with them- not with the kids anymore. So, I was sitting at the counter of our local diner drinking a coke I’d bought with my allowance money, when there he was, still wearing the coat that my father’d stayed up all night to clean.

He walked up to the counter, right next to me (to be fair, it wasn’t a very big counter), and flirted with the waitress. Just like my mother, she giggled and disappeared, a smile on her face. I just stared at him, wondering where he’d come from, and why he insisted on wearing a coat like that in the current weather. I mean, it was early October, which in Florida means that summer is just barely starting to wonder if it’s worn out its welcome.

He seemed to notice me staring, and he smiled at me, kindly, not flirting at all. Which meant he was treating me like a little girl, and I knew it. So I sniffed at him, and asked him how the coat was holding up, and why did he keep wearing it, when anyone with sense knew it was too hot for winter coats still?

And he laughed, and told me that he needed it to keep the rain off, since we Floridians insisted on having it every day, and yes, the stain came out beautifully- and the next time he knew someone that needed help getting Parellan blood out of a garment, he’d be sure to recommend my father.

Then, he bought me that pie, and told me a tall tale about some pirates he’d met once- it involved the reason that he could never look a lemon meringue pie straight in the face again- and then he was gone again, with a wink at the waitress that said maybe he’d be back after her shift was over.


	3. Twenty

The third time I met him, I was working two jobs and wishing I was dead. I was twenty years old, then. I did day shifts at the laundry for practically no money and night shifts at the diner for slightly more than no money, hoping to someday scrape together enough to go away to college. All my friends had either left town or settled by then, and I was the only one left still in the in-between; not yet willing to just marry that Dean boy (though he was nice enough, I suppose) and start having his babies, but with no chances to go out in the world on my own. Not yet.

I was reading that night. I did that, trying to keep my mind sharp for the day I might realize my dreams after all. I was looking at a book on French history when he walked in the door. He came up to the counter, and sat down, and this time I was the waitress he flirted with. I didn’t even hear what he said to me, though, because when I looked up, it was him- just as I’d seen him when he was six, and just as I’d seen him when I was thirteen. My father was starting to go grey, now, and my mother was doing her best to hide her age with makeup and henna, but the man in the coat looked the same as he ever did. Hell, the coat looked the same as it ever did, and he was still wearing it, and it only September and hot as the Devil’s sitting room.

“I don’t,” I said to him, once I’d got my mouth back shut again, “believe for a moment that you wear that coat to keep off the rain.”

His forehead wrinkled, and he looked me over with those blue, blue eyes of his. Suddenly, his face lit up, and he grinned at me again, and this time he wasn’t treating me like a little girl. “The girl from the laundry!” he said, those eyes sparkling. “How they do grow up. So, what are the chances of coffee that won’t actually poison me, and maybe some pie?”

So I made him his coffee special and then I got him a slice of lemon meringue, just to see his face.


	4. Twenty (Again)

The fourth time I met him was later that night, and there was no coffee involved, and even less pie.

It was about two in the morning. I’d gotten out late after closing the diner (and mopping the damn floor, and wiping the counters and emptying the till, and making sure the books were all right and tight…) and I was driving down the road, headed home. Home, at that point, was my parents place, just outside of town. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, I feel I should mention that I was, in fact, speeding. But how fast I was going had nothing to do with what happened, I swear.

I was just driving, and then something flew straight at the front of the car. Something big. It smacked against the windshield and the car shuddered with the impact. I hit the brakes, and skidded, and I could feel whatever it was bump underneath the wheels. When I finally stopped, the car- it was one of those big old Volvos, and built like a tank, thank god- had spun almost 180 degrees. I put on my emergency blinkers, and grabbed my flashlight. I thought it was some kind of animal, or a tree branch, or something. God knew what. Anyhow, I figured I shouldn’t leave whatever it was sitting in the the road for some other poor bastard to hit in the middle of the night.

Between the headlights and the humongous flashlight my dad insisted I keep in my car (“You can always use it to hit the bad guys if you need to,” he used to say), I got a pretty good look at the thing that had hit my car.

There was a smear of dark, shiny liquid covering the grey pavement of the road, leading into a big, wet pool that was slowly growing. In the center of the pool was a man. His arms and legs were hideously askew. By the angle and presentation, I was pretty sure that one of his arms wasn’t really attached to his body anymore. It was just floating in the sleeve of a shirt that I thought might used to have been blue.

It was fairly difficult to tell, because his chest was ripped open, his guts spilled out onto the road. From somewhere, far away, I heard myself trying to catalogue the things that should still have been in his body from an anatomy textbook I’d read once. I’d been mesmerized by it then, with a sick fascination at seeing human bodies with the skin removed. It was a hell of a lot less fascinating right then, staring at the real thing.

I shined the flashlight at his head, trying to see if I recognized him. Or her- I'd assumed it was a man by his size, but to be fair, the chest was so mangled I couldn't tell for sure. One side of his head was smashed, and I could see grey-white brain matter smeared across the rough surface of the ground. The half of his head that wasn’t smashed, though, was the face of the man in the coat (definitely a man, then), his one remaining blue eye open and staring.

The next thing I knew, I was off to the side of the road, puking my guts up. In the back of my head, I found myself wondering where his coat was. The rest of my head, though, was worrying about what was going to happen to me. Vehicular manslaughter, maybe? At the least, I’d have to pay to get the bumper repaired, and there went my college money.

I was laughing while I cried when I heard a sound behind me. It was a long, gasping breath, and I couldn’t imagine who or what could be making that noise. Someone else crying? But I hadn’t heard anyone else arrive. I turned around, and looked.

This is the point when I have to warn you about something. You go around in this world, right, and you have certain opinions about how it works. And you’re smart, and you know things about how the world is, and you’re rational. You believe in science, because it’s the future, and in religion, because that’s what decent people do, and you absolutely don’t believe in magic or little green men.

Anyhow, this is the point when you’re going to have to make a decision. Do you think I’m the sort of person who would lie to you? Do you think I’m easily misled? I could have been hypnotized, maybe- or maybe I made up this part to make myself feel better. But maybe, you think I deserve the benefit of the doubt. I hope so.

Because what I saw next was the coat man, pulling himself up off the pavement. His head was whole, with two clear eyes where I’d only seen one a few minutes ago. He reached over with his good hand and pushed the severed arm back up to its socket. A moment later, he was moving it. Shaking it, as though to work out the kinks. He scooped his guts up, then, and kinda shoved them back into his chest. I saw it knit closed. He shook his whole body, as if settling into it, and stood up.

“Dammit!” he said, looking down at himself. “I _liked_ this shirt.”

Quite frankly, I think it’s a testament to my nerve that I didn’t pass out right then and there. I may, however, have made a kind of a strangled noise, down low in my throat. In any case, he turned, and looked down at me, where I was still kneeling on the ground next to the ditch. “Laundry girl!” he said, grinning from ear to ear. “Please tell me your car still works. I could use a ride.”


	5. Aftermath

He drove back to town, not me. I think he took one look at me and decided that I wasn’t fit to be behind the wheel, because he came right over and started herding me towards the passenger side of the car. “C’mon, sweetheart,” he said, gently, “You don’t want to stay here. Trust me- it’s time to go.”

When we got to the car, he did the gentlemanly thing, and opened my door for me. He even made sure I was snapped in, before jumping into the driver’s seat and revving the engine. He hardly copped a feel at all, either. Just enough to make a girl feel like he’d noticed, without making her feel like he was taking advantage.

We’d been on the road for maybe five minutes, when all of a sudden, my mouth started talking all of its own accord. “Where’s your coat?” I asked, not looking at him.

“I took it off,” he said, and I could hear the amusement in his voice. “I learned my lesson on that one: take the coat off first. It’s just as well, I mean, look what happened to this shirt.” He sounded genuinely mournful, there. “I’ll be lucky if the pants aren’t a complete loss as well. At least I left the leather ones behind; losing those would have been a _real_ tragedy.”

I found that I didn’t have anything to say about that, so I didn’t say anything at all. We drove on in silence, for a while. My mind was spinning. I mean, he’d just spontaneously up and healed himself there, like he was a big lizard or something. Growing its tail back, except that was supposed to take time, and he did it in moments, and come to think, he didn’t just heal himself, because he was flat dead with his brains on the pavement and his head bashed in, and did you know that lizards have two penises? True fact. I read it once, in a book.

Suddenly, he made a strange noise. “Oh, come on,” he said, drawling the words out. “You’re not even going to _ask_? Is my coat _really_ the only thing you're curious about?”

And there my mouth went again, having a conversation without consulting me first. “I just figured that a man’s business is his own, by and large. I was kind of hoping you’d pay for the bumper, though. Do you have any kind of insurance?” I heard myself ask.

He shot me a weird sort of look, and then he started to laugh. He laughed so hard that he actually stopped the car. So there I was, sitting in an unmoving car in the middle of the night (onto morning, at that point), headlights shining on into the darkness, and a dead man laughing hysterically in the driver’s seat next to me.

I looked over at him, closer this time. The blood on his shirt and pants was still disturbingly fresh, and I was uncomfortably sure that it was going to stain my upholstery forever. He was leaning on the steering wheel, his head thrown back and his eyes squeezed shut as he laughed. He quieted down briefly, looked over at me, his lips quivering, and just started laughing again.

Finally, he subsided. “Thanks,” he said. “I needed that.” He started the car again.

“Well,” I asked, a little put out. There’s nothing like being laughed at to make a girl self-conscious, and also cranky. “Are you going to pay for my bumper? It’s not like money grows on trees.”

He looked sideways at me. “You did hit _me_ ,” he pointed out, in a tone of utter reasonableness. “I could ask you to pay for my shirt.”

“First of all,” I answered, trying not to think too hard about this conversation, “it wasn’t my fault. You leaped out at me- and what was that about, by the way?” I tried for a stern look. I don’t think I succeeded; he just smirked at me again. “And second, I’d be perfectly happy to pay for a new shirt for you, provided you pay for a new bumper for me. It’s only fair, I think.”

He didn’t quite start laughing at me again, but I could tell he wanted to. He held out a hand sideways, managing the steering wheel with his other hand. “Deal,” he said. “But you have to let me borrow your car through tomorrow.”

“You sure helped yourself to it tonight,” I said, archly.

“Oh, be fair,” he said, grinning. “I needed a ride back to town. Besides, you didn’t look like you were up for driving. I was doing you a favor. And after I’ve gotten clothes on again, I’ll take you back to wherever is home. Just a short detour, that’s all.” He held his hand out more urgently. “Come on. Do we have a deal, or not?”

“Fine,” I said. “But I don’t trust you not to run off with it. If you want the car, you have to take me along, too.”

To be honest, I’m not sure why I said that. It was a stupid thing to say. I mean, if I didn’t trust him, why was I going to go off to god knows where with him? I think I was just trying not to give in too easily. He had this way about him, you know, where you wanted to do what he asked you to do, without even knowing why. My daddy did it, back in the day, and I did it, just that day earlier, but I knew there was something else behind that charm and that easy smile now. It made me wary, even if I was still too dumb to know when to run the hell away.

He looked at me, and for a moment, he was all serious. No smiles, no laughing. His eyes were dark, and strange, and old, and he looked at me like I was a plate in that anatomy textbook I used to read: my skin stripped bare, and my organs laid out neatly for everyone to see.

And then, just like that, he was just a man again, and he was smiling. He reached out and grabbed my hand. He had a hell of a grip, and his skin was warm and dry. “Deal,” he said. “But when you’re pissed at me later, remember that this was all your idea.”


	6. The Desert Sands

He pulled into Mr. Thompson’s little motel (the Hotel Desert Sands, with a neon picture of a palm tree and a sand dune out the front) and parked. “Coming in?” he asked.

I kind of shrugged. Seemed silly not to, at this point. If he wanted to rape or kill me, he could damn well have done it anywhere, once he had me in the car (and my mind just did everything it could to forget what I’d seen, that this man had come back from the dead, bone and flesh knitting together to be whole again, right before my eyes). I unbuckled myself and followed the coat man into his room.

There wasn’t much there, in the room. One small bag, sitting on the suitcase stand, open. That familiar wool coat and some shirts hanging in the miniature closet next to the door. An extra pair of boots next to the bed.

The coat man looked at himself once in the full length mirror on the bathroom door, and sighed heavily. He began stripping off the ragged remains of his shirt. As he undressed, I found myself staring at his chest. It was smooth and well-muscled. The coat man clearly worked out. I might have found it attractive, if I hadn’t seen it in raggedy chunks not twenty minutes previous.

“Like what you see?” he said, and I could hear the smirk in his voice. My eyes snapped guiltily up to his face.

“Just wondering what your monthly cleaning bill looks like,” I answered, shortly. It was a lie, and it was clear that he knew it was a lie, but he just laughed, and let it pass. And then, making no allowances for the fact that I was in the room other than that he already happened to be half facing away from me, he stripped off the rest of his clothes.

I could tell he was watching me, out of the corner of his eye- wondering what I would do, maybe? I wasn’t sure what I _should do_ , to be honest. It felt like a test of some kind. I wanted to pass. Which gives you an idea of the kind of magic this guy had. I mean, he messed up my car, upended my sense of reality, and still, I just wanted to prove myself to him. Stupid, stupid girl- that was me.

In the end, though, I just did what I would have done anyway: I looked. I wanted to know if there was some sign of what he’d been through, or some clue as to what he was (since last I knew, the only human being known to wake up after getting gutted lived closer to Nazareth than he did to Ocala). I looked him over as well as I could without it being _completely_ obvious that I was staring.

I hadn’t seen a lot of naked male bodies in my life at that point. There was the Dean boy, and this guy named Travis, and my brother, and my dad on a few occasions that I was trying to forget about. Anyway, so I hadn’t seen that many naked men, but enough to know what they were supposed to look like. The coat man looked ordinary in every way that I could tell. He was in better shape than any man I’d seen up till then, but other than that, he looked normal.

“I’m just going to shower off now,” he said, turning back to face me. I tried not to blush, but I’m fairly certain I didn’t succeed. He looked normal from that direction, too, just for the record.

“Um, okay,” I said, and off he went.

He’d barely turned the water on before I started snooping. It was his own fault. If he didn’t want me looking through his things, he damn well shouldn’t have left me alone with them.

There was nothing in the coat pockets at all- not even lint. In the suitcase, I found only clothes. No toiletries, even, but those were probably in the bathroom. I was just about to go check the drawers of the nightstand, when my hand brushed a button at the bottom of the suitcase, down under the fabric where you wouldn’t see it to look at it.

I pressed it, and the whole bottom of the suitcase flipped up, throwing clothes everywhere. Underneath the false bottom was a padded section, full of weird-looking weapons. Guns, mostly, but a few knives also, and some things I had no idea what they were. I froze, staring at them. If I’d had any sense, I’d’ve left right then. Taken my car, cut my losses, and gone home to my mama and daddy.

I think, however, that we’ve firmly established by now that sense and I haven’t been on speaking terms for years.

I was still trying to put his clothes back in the case when he emerged from the shower, naked as a jaybird and toweling his hair off.

“I- uh-” I stammered, ever the soul of wit.

“Found my toys, did you?” he said, smiling. He padded over, shoved me gently out of the way with his hip, and began rooting around in the suitcase for socks.

“I guess,” I answered, blushing. I backed away and sat on the bed, thinking about what I should say next. I decided to stick to my current policy of not asking him questions that I probably didn’t want to know the answers to. I felt very good about my decision, too. It meshed well with my policy of trying not to look at him right now.

“How the hell did you manage to stick your arm on, and grow your head back, and… and… and all that?” I blurted out, suddenly. “You’re not Jesus, right? Because I don’t think I could take that.”

Dammit. There was that decision, blown straight to hell. I was still managing just fine with the not-looking-directly-at-the-half-naked-dead-man policy, though, thank god. Out of the corner of my eye, however, I could see that he was grinning at me again.

“I was wondering when you were going to get around to that,” he said, conversationally. “Not sure what to tell you, though.” He turned his back and went to the closet for a shirt. “I don’t really know how it works, to be honest. I just… can’t die. Haven't yet, anyway.” Clothes acquired, he pulled his pants on, buttoned the fly, and began pulling his socks on.

Dammit! There went the not-looking policy.

Ignoring my personal anguish over the collapse of my principles, he grabbed his shirt and continued. “I died once, and then I woke up, and all of a sudden- shoot me, stab me, poison me- I always wake up. And I am not, to the best of my knowledge, Jesus. So-” he said, turning to me, his shirt hanging loose and unbuttoned around his torso, “I can’t keep calling you ‘Laundry Girl’, as delightfully retro-superheroic as that might be. Have you got a name I can use?”

“Uh,” I said, not- _not_ \- staring at his chest, “Carla. Um. Carla Barkes, but I guess you don’t need to know that.”

“Pleased to be formally introduced to you at last, Carla Barkes,” he said, his eyes twinkling. He held out his hand. “Captain Jack Harkness, at your service.”


	7. A Big Question

“Captain of _what_?” I blurted out, shaking his hand..

He went to buttoning his shirt, then, thank god. “Long ago, and far away,” he said, conversationally, which was clearly his way of telling me that he wasn’t going to answer. I was feeling kind of put out by the whole situation, though, so I decided I wasn’t just going to let him sit there being mysterious.

“Not a military captain, or a police captain, then?” I said.

“Not your military, or your police. Not exactly. Look,” he said, buttoning his shirt cuffs and tucking in his tails, “It doesn’t actually matter. I’m not here for them, and you wouldn’t know who they were anyhow.”

“Where are you from, then?” I narrowed my eyes at him. His smile never wavered, but his eyes (blue, blue eyes, one open and staring sightlessly at the night sky) were closed off- impenetrable, as my list of college vocabulary words would say. He looked at me for a long moment, and then popped open the bottom of the suit case, cushioning it with his hand so it didn’t throw clothes everywhere.

“You remind me of someone I used to know,” he said, lightly. “Cute little redhead, absolute killer in a Frixnari mini-sarong.”

“I’m not a redhead,” I said. Well, I may have snapped at him a little. It had been a long night, and the enigmatic thing only remains charming for so long before it gets irritating. Besides, it was true: I am as mousy as the day is long. My hair is the most boring shade of brown imaginable, and my eyes match. I’d considered dyeing it to something more interesting, but I didn’t want to have to watch my father go into formal mourning for my natural hair color. Besides, who would there be to notice, in this town?

Anyhow, he smiled again (did he ever stop?) and rummaged around in the bottom of his very mysterious suitcase. “Well, not everyone can be,” he said. “She used to ask questions like you do, though.”

“What happened to her?” I asked, more to have something to say than out of any real desire to know.

“Ah-” he said, and he sounded almost sheepish. “Well, she died.” Coming from a man pulling guns out of a secret compartment in his suitcase, that made me a little nervous, if I’m going to be honest here. And why not? If I can’t be honest here and now, then where, and when? Anyhow, that nervousness must have showed on my face, because he looked over at me, all apologetic. “Sorry, didn’t think that particular comparison through. If it makes you feel better, it’s not in my plans for you to join her.”

“Well,” I said, “as long as it’s not planned.” As I said that, he pulled one of the guns out, checked it over, and made it disappear onto his person. I watched with the same kind of sick fascination you give car accidents and very, very ugly people. I just couldn’t look away. “So,” I said, “You just need the car through tomorrow?”

“Reconsidering coming with me?” he said, with a teasing, sideways smile.

“No,” I snapped defensively, which was just about the stupidest thing I _could_ have said, just there and then. What can I say? He had my goat, so to speak. “I was just asking. For reference. ”

“Well, then, for reference, I will absolutely not need your car again after tomorrow.” He cocked his head. “It’s possible that tomorrow might stretch into the wee hours,” he said, in the tone of someone making a confession. “But that’s it. Absolute maximum, I promise.”

“And- ah- when are you going to want it? I mean, are you going out again tonight? Or, this morning, if we’re going to be accurate,” I babbled.

“Excellent question,” he said, and began fiddling with the leather band around his wrist. I don’t think I mentioned that before. He never took it off, so technically I suppose he wasn’t fully naked, before. Somehow, though, a leather bracelet or not didn’t seem to make much difference to his nakedness quotient.

Except that it didn’t seem to be a bracelet at all, really. He flipped it open, and there were noises and little lights, like one of those watches you see in a spy movies. It was stupid, but I think that was the first time I was really scared. I think the resurrection (to use another college vocabulary word) was just too big for me to process, and the guns were too strange. But the spy watch, that I could understand enough to know that anyone who had such a thing must be... dangerous.

“It’ll be a few hours,” he finally said, decisively. “I’m going to get a little shut-eye. If you’re coming with me, you’d better just stay here. It’d take too long to run you home and pick you up again.”

And sleep with the dead man, in a room notable for only having a single (if quite large) bed. Right. “Um.” I said, eloquent as always. He, on the other hand, closed his suitcase and flopped down on the bed. Seeing him lying there ( _his one good eye staring sightlessly up into the night_ ) made me shiver a little, remembering.

“Are you okay?” he asked, pushing himself up on his elbows.

And then I was outright shaking, and tears prickled traitorously against my eyes. “It’s just-” I gulped, and wrapped my arms around myself. “You were-”

And then he was next to me, and I could smell the warm _aliveness_ of him. I wasn’t sure whether it made me want to grab on to him or run for dear life. “Dead?” he asked. “That was a pretty bad one. I’m sorry you had to see it.”

“It was my fault! I hit you with my car!” I said, not looking at him. I threaded my fingers through my hair- my nervous tic since forever. “This is crazy. You were dead, and your guts were all over the road, and there was so much blood, and nobody just gets up and walks away from that. I should be facing jail for vehicular manslaughter, not sitting in a hotel room with you. And- and-”

“Hey,” he said, gently. “It’s a lot to deal with at once, I know. And I know it was gruesome, but it wasn’t really your fault. I promise. Besides, I did get better, didn’t I?” He put his hand on my back.

“What is this all about?” I asked. “Who are you? You come back from the dead, and you’ve got a James Bond watch, and guns in your suitcase. And don’t laugh at me. I’m tired of being laughed at,” I added, feeling slightly ridiculous.

“I’m not laughing,” he reassured me. “Ah- well, let’s see,” he said, getting up and looking out the window. “What is this all about? It’s kind of a big question, don’t you think?”


	8. Flyboys

He was quiet for a long time, staring out the window, standing there in his bare feet and suspenders. I could only see the edge of his face, but enough to see that the smile was gone, replaced by a deep and quiet melancholy. It made me shiver a bit, and it’s not like it was cold. The AC wasn’t on, and it may have been the wee hours of the morning, but that didn’t mean it was any part chill, not in this part of the country.

I wasn’t sure what I ought to do in that silence, so I just waited, rubbing my toes together nervously. Finally, he turned back around. “What the hell,” he said lightly. “It’s been a long time since I actually told anyone the truth. And it’s not like anyone would believe you if you did tell them.”

And I didn’t know what to make of that, either. Not then, anyhow. Was he right? I’m telling you now, exactly what he told me. Will you believe me? Or will you smile one of those frozen sort of smiles, thinking on how I’m clearly not right in the head and wondering how fast you can get away if it gets necessary? I swear, I’m harmless.

He came and sat down next to me. “That was a hint, by the way,” he said. The smile was back, but it was all in his mouth, and not at all in his eyes. “Don’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you.”

“Ah...” I said, and my mouth was suddenly dry, and not only from his very warm, very masculine proximity. I stared resolutely at my toes. “I’m not one to go spreading tales,” I managed, as sharply as I could.

“I’m from the future,” he said, seriously, watching me closely.

“Ah... okay?” I said, not sure what the correct response to that might be. Besides, I wanted him to keep going. “I’m from the future” was interesting, don’t get me wrong, but didn’t really account for everything I’d seen. Why was he there in the first place? How did he come back to life? What did he want with my car?

“Except, I am. Really.” He looked down at me, daring me to doubt him. “I’m from the 51st century- 31 centuries in your future. I was part of this... organization. Like the police, sort of. And they stole my memory and threw me out.”

I wanted to ask “why?”, except that would be stupid, wouldn’t it? If they stole his memory, he wouldn’t know. I furrowed up my forehead, thinking. I finally came up with “I’m sorry,” which seemed reasonable, so I said it.

“It was... it was a long time ago. Or forward, depending on how you look at it.” He tossed the words off easily, like he was dismissing the whole affair, but I could tell that it bothered him. His smile, all teeth and blue eyes, was just a little strained around the edges.

I thought I might have to keep asking questions to get him to keep going, but he seemed to want to talk now. “Then,” he said, “I met these people. I did something really stupid, and I nearly got myself and a whole lot of people killed. You among them, technically, I guess.” He nodded to me, but kept going before I could ask how. “But there was this man. And he saved me, and everybody else.”

“This was in the future?” I asked, uncertain.

“The past, actually,” he said, with one of those smug I-know-something-you-don’t-know sort of looks. “Flyboys with tight uniforms. One of my favorite eras.”

The look on his face right there was one of such plain and gleeful lustiness that I was taken aback. Men liking men was nothing I’d ever come across, not in real life. My entire experience of the concept was boys at school taunting each other for being sissies. “Why don’t you go kiss your _boyfriend_ ” was the surest way to get a guy to punch you, where I grew up.

That was the moment when I believed his crazy time-travel story, actually. I figured that anyone who was so frank and open and easy about something that was, in my experience, only talked about in ugly whispers and mockery had to be from a galaxy far, far away. Dumb, I know, but I was a small-town girl, wasn’t I? You try growing up where and when I did, and see if you think any different.

I was quiet for a long moment, staring at him. I don’t think he twigged to why I was staring, either, because when I opened my mouth and croaked out, “You like men?” he looked real surprised himself. Then he started to laugh. Then he leaned over, one hand reaching over me to rest on the bed to the right of my hip, and kissed me.

His other hand reached around the back of my neck, and twined itself up in my hair. His fingers were strong and gentle, and all I could think about was being in the middle of that kiss. It was playful, and hungry, all at the same time. His mouth was warm and soft and tasted like sex, fear, and a deep and unsatisfied desire for something unnamable.

When he pulled away from me, I was trembling, and flushed. “Late twentieth century mores,” he said, his face still close to mine, his hand still twisted up in my hair. “I’ve never gotten used to them.” And then he pulled his hands and his body back away from me.

It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about, and a moment longer to remember what exactly I was doing here. “Uh...” I said, hoping desperately not to make an idiot of myself. “Not men, then.”

He rolled his eyes at me, which was my clue that I’d failed in that hope. He flopped backwards onto the bed, stretching his arms out over his head. “I will never understand how quick you people are to create arbitrary categories and stick people straight into them. The problem is,” he said, rolling onto his side and propping himself on one arm. The effect was almost disturbingly intimate; as though we were lovers, lying side by side. “What do you do when you find someone who doesn’t fit your neat little categories?” he continued. “Pretend they don’t exist? Make new categories? Shoot them in the head?”

What he said didn’t really make sense to me, then. Looking back, of course, I understand what he meant. Lord knows, I’ve had the chance to find out, in the years since I last saw Captain Jack Harkness.

What I did then, though, was just shake my head. “Weren’t you telling me about, um... flyboys? In the past?” I asked, trying to change the subject back, away from kissing and observations about society that I didn’t yet understand. “Except I don’t see what that has to do with us here now, and why you need my car, and what you-” I broke off. “Why you flew out at me like that, before. On the road,” I finished, slowly.

“Right,” he said, still leaning on one arm. “I was meeting a friend.”

“A friend who was trying to get you killed?” I asked, snappishly, because I was testy that he was playing enigmatic again.

“Feisty!” he observed, grinning. “Well, my friend’s a little bit angry with me. I can’t blame her, really. I did trap her here against her will.”

I sighed, and rolled my eyes. “Are you just incapable of starting at the beginning, and telling a straight story?” I asked.

“Fine, fine,” he said, flopping onto his back again. “But don’t blame me. Some stories don’t have a straight in the first place.” He paused, looking contemplative. “So, I met these people, and managed- no thanks to my own stupidity- not to kill everyone on your planet. And then, I ended up way in the future. Hundreds of thousands of years in the future. And I got killed, and I came back to life, and then I got dumped. These people, they just left me there. Maybe they thought I was still dead. Maybe they’d just been looking for an excuse to get rid of me. I don’t know.”

He didn’t look straight at me then, but the expression on his face was as twisted up with pain as I’d ever seen on a person. I didn’t know what to say to him. There seemed to be no way of touching that terrible pain, and I decided that I wasn’t even going to try. It was going to have to be someone’s job, someday, but it wasn’t mine.

It took him a long time before he started talking again, his voice rough on the edges. “So there I was, stranded in the future. Except, I had this.” He lifted up his wrist, showing off the spy-watch. “It’s a vortex manipulator. When it’s working, it lets me travel in time and space.”

“Which is,” I said slowly, “How you got here from the future.”

“Give the lady a prize!” he said, much more cheerfully than I felt the situation demanded. But far be it from me to judge what other people have to do to keep themselves going. “Except, a couple hundred thousand years was a little too much for it.” He tapped the watch meaningfully. “It burned out and I’m stuck here. Been stuck here, as it happens, for a little over a century already. Well, 14 years ago, I was down this way for no particular reason, when I ran into someone I used to know, back in the old days- and some of her friends. She tried to get me to do something I didn’t want to do and I reprogrammed her vortex manipulator so she’s stuck in this one place, jumping forward at scheduled intervals.”

He breezed through that part like it wasn’t important, and I could tell it wasn’t what he really wanted to be talking about. The other stuff- flyboys and almost destroying the world, whatever that was about- that was gnawing at him. This thing was just something he had to deal with today. I nodded at him, unsure what he was going to do next.

“So, that brings us up to date. She’s still trying to fix her manipulator so she can come kick my ass, and in the meantime, I have to show up here every seven years, hoping I can resolve the whole thing once and for all.” He threw a pillow at me. “Can we sleep now? She’s due to rematerialize in about three and a half hours, and I’m tired.”

So he set an alarm on his watch (“No way to sleep through this,” he said, cheerfully, “not without chopping my wrist off.”) and we laid down on the bed together. There was no chivalrous offer to take the chair or the floor instead. He just flopped down on his back, hands under his head. I sat there for a moment, not sure what I should do. Eventually, he cracked open an eye. “Plenty of room for two,” he observed. “And could you turn out that light?”

And I switched the lamp off and laid down and somehow managed to get a little sleep, lying there next to a gently-snoring time traveling corpse.


	9. Morning

When I woke up, he was standing next to the bed, fully dressed and loading a gun into a holster under his coat. “Time to go, Sleeping Beauty,” he said, grinning. “You’re driving.” There was a cup of hotel coffee waiting for me on the side table. I sipped it as he finished preparing himself and I tried to process the events of the previous night.

Flirting, and lemon meringue pie.

A thump, and a thud, and squealing brakes, and blood seeping into the asphalt.

An arm, knitting itself back together before my eyes.

Time travel.

Flyboys.

A kiss.

I shook my head, trying to clear it. I had a suspicion I was going to need a clear head- and maybe an open mind- today.

We walked to the car. I was still blinking while I reached for my keys. He was whistling jauntily, his hands in his pockets and that grin back on his face. “You know where we’re going?” I asked as I settled myself in the drivers’ seat.

“In a purely spatial sense, yes,” he said, impishly. “I make no promises about broader interpretations.” He swung into the passenger’s seat and belted himself in.

The early morning sun was glaringly bright as I drove east along the county road he pointed me to. He was quiet, at first, and I was willing to let him be. We had the windows down on both sides against the heat, and the sound of air rushing past us made its own noisy silence in my ears.

Finally, just like I knew it would be, it was him who broke that silence. “I can’t figure out,” he said, “Whether you’re going with me because you’re curious, or because you’re afraid of me.” He said it with that grin on his face, but I knew he wasn’t joking.

“I’m not afraid of you,” I said, and right then it happened to be true. I’m not going to lie to you- the night before, I’d had a few moments of true terror. I still wasn’t 100% sure I believed his crazy story (but I did, with all my heart, no matter what my head said), but right then I was sure that, whoever or whatever he was, he didn’t mean me any kind of harm. I kept my eyes on the road, watching him watching me in the edge of my vision.

“That’s probably not very smart,” he said. “But I’ll take it. Turn left here.” So I did. A little while later, he told me to pull the car over, and I did that, too. He turned to me, then, unfastening his seatbelt and checking over his weapons and equipment. His face was serious, his blue eyes piercing.

“You stay here,” he said. “Just stay with the car, and if I come running, wait for me to get in and gun it. But if anyone else shows up, either with me or on their own, you just get out of here, okay?”

I nodded my understanding. He’d get better if he got hurt. I might not. “Good luck,” I told him, since _be careful_ or _don’t do anything stupid_ seemed a bit pointless.

He grinned back at me. “Who needs luck when you’re this good?” he asked, and then he was gone, running into the scrub palm and live oak, his coat billowing behind him.

I turned the car off (but left the key in the ignition) and pulled out that French history book to pass the time, but I couldn’t focus. I found myself wondering what he knew about French history, and if he’d ever been there. I could imagine him, at the court at Versailles, charming French women and irritating their French husbands. Or maybe not irritating the husbands, as such, I reflected, remembering what he’d said about men in uniform the night before.

Mostly, I found myself staring off in the direction he’d run in, trying to catch a glimpse or a sound of what he was doing. Had he found his “friend”? How was it going? I was sore tempted to get out of the car right then and investigate, let me assure you. I think the only thing that kept me there was knowing that he might come bolting out of the woods at any minute, and he’d need me for his getaway. In retrospect, he might have told me to wait for him on purpose, knowing that I’d stay if I thought it would help him. It was all moot in the end, of course, but I like to think he was trying to keep me safe.

In any case, I was still staring off into the woods when he came running out of them, coat flapping and hollering like a cat on fire. It was a jolt of adrenalin like I hadn’t felt since- well, since the night before, but not for a goodly time before that or since. I fumbled a little getting that key turned and the car started. That’s why I didn’t see what was following him. Not at first.

I would start this by saying I hope you believe what I’m about to tell you, but I’ve got through resurrection and time travel, and you’re still listening. So I’m just going to assume that you’re either giving me the benefit of the doubt, or you’re taking notes to get me sent to the crazy house and are hoping I give you lots more material to work with. Either way, what I saw following him out of the woods was the biggest damn bug I ever saw, or ever would hope to see. Four legs and one set of arms, and more eyes than I could think about, and screaming bloody murder as it chased Captain Jack Harkness out of the trees. Later, remembering, I noticed that it had one of those leather watches around one of its wrists, and that it had clothes and a belt hung with some kind of something. At the time, though, I just froze into place, staring at the thing.

Around then, they were getting close enough to me to hear what they were saying. “Sweetheart!” the Captain shouted back at the bug thing, not slowing down at all. “Honey, I understand why you’re angry, but it was nothing personal.” The bug thing, who I was rapidly coming to realize was his “friend” and probably female, shot at him, and then screamed something I didn’t understand.

The coat man dodged, sort of, and laughed. “Well, I wasn’t about to let you go mining a Class Three planet for its resources, no matter how good you were in bed,” he said in a tone that was somehow both flirtatious and utterly reasonable.

By then, I’d remembered the part where I was supposed to drive away if anyone but him appeared. With a little bit of defiance, I decided to stay. If I left, I knew, I’d always wonder. Besides, the coat man seemed to still be making for the car, and I didn’t want to leave him stranded. Okay, I wanted explanations and my bumper fixed, but I also didn’t want to leave him stranded.

That was when the bug thing noticed I was there.


	10. Flashbulb

They say that in very, very stressful or memorable moments, that we remember every detail clearly, even the unimportant ones. I’ve heard it called “flash-bulb” memory, because it’s like your mind takes a picture, burned into your brain forever. That’s how it was for me. What came next happened so terribly fast, but this is what I remember of it.

Me, one hand on the gear shift, and the other on the wheel. My feet on the pedals, and the smell of oil and sun-burnt vinyl. Fingerprints on the top of the window glass, partway rolled down. Captain Jack Harkness, the coat man, shouting something in a language I didn’t understand ( _kalatu nerad’ ta la_ , it sounded like, to me, but I still don’t know what it meant). The creature swinging one of her arms in my direction.

Then, the sound of impact, creaking metal and shattering glass. The car, being shoved rightward. My head, jerking left and smacking into the frame of the door. Bits of broken glass in the window, inches from my face, as my head jerked back the other way. My hands, clutching the steering wheel. My feet, struggling unsuccessfully to get the car in gear, and the plastic lion I kept hanging from the rearview mirror swinging wildly.

The second impact. A flash of light, the creak of tortured metal, and me spinning up, and over. The trees and sky making crazy streaks outside the spiderweb cracks of my smashed windshield. My hands, clutched white-knuckled on the steering wheel as though it might hold me in place as my car toppled over. A spray of blood across the dash, and my casual curiosity. _Where might that have come from?_

And then the car stopped moving, and I hung there, suspended by my seatbelt. My head hurt and my hands hurt and my chest hurt like holy hell, and it occurred to me that I probably should get out of the car. I released my belt, pulling myself carefully upright and towards the far door- mine seemed altogether too close to the action- with my miraculously unbroken arms. I didn’t even try to open the battered door. I just pulled myself out of the opening, scraping my back just a little on the broken remains of the window.

My nose was bleeding, and I was cut up pretty good, but I seemed to be basically intact. I crouched behind the shattered hulk of my car, and peeked around, trying to get a look at what had happened to the coat man and the bug thing. Bug person?

He’d jumped on top of her, at some point, and they were wrestling over some device. I was guessing it was some kind of weapon, but it didn’t look exactly like a gun. There was blood on his face and hands. I could see why, too, when he landed a punch on her. Soft human flesh and bone weren’t made to crunch into hard, pointy bug shell. That didn’t seem to slow him down, though. They twisted, and rolled together, and when they stopped, he was turned towards me instead of her.

His face was all bright blue eyes and streaks of blood, and this breathtaking anger and determination. I’d never seen a look like that on a person’s face before. I’ve seen it a few times since then, but not often. People just don’t get put in positions where they have to feel that hard and that fast and that _much_ very often. I think the coat man, though- that Captain Jack Harkness- I think he must have been more than passing familiar with such situations.

And then, while I was still watching him, two things happened more or less simultaneously. The first was that, in my continued creeping around the car, I stumbled over one of the coat man’s guns. I recognized it from his suitcase the night before. The way they were tussling at each other, it’s no surprise that various bits and bobs they were wearing would fly off.

The second thing was that the bug creature flipped him over, slamming him into the ground. He shook his head, dazed for just a moment. She raised one of her arms, that weapon in her clawed hand pointing down at him. And then I shot her.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about why I did that, in the years since. After all, she couldn’t have killed him, so I wasn’t saving him. Maybe I was just trying to protect myself. If last night was anything to go by, it would take him at least a little time to come back to life if she killed him. And, in the meantime, she’d be free to come after me. And I did live, obviously, so it sort of worked.

Anyway, regardless of why I did it, I did. I pointed the weapon. I pulled the trigger. This blast of light came out of the end and slammed into the bug creature. The gun jumped a little in my hand. She howled and spun and turned on me. I fired again, my hands shaking, too scared to aim. Even without aiming, though, the blast hit the thing I was staring at most. Which, so you understand, was her weapon hand, rapidly coming to bear on me. She dropped the weapon, and screamed.

Behind her, I could see the coat man pulling himself off the ground, but she wasn’t paying him any attention. She jumped at me and, before I could fire again, _spat_ at me. I pulled my arms up in front of my face at the last moment. They caught most of it, but not all. I could feel it hit my hair and on my neck and chest. When I opened my eyes, my arms were covered in yellowy goo, and the coat man was standing behind her with his gun raised. “I didn’t want it to come to this,” he said in a sad voice, and shot her in the head. She crumpled to the ground, and winked out of existence like she'd never been there at all.

Around then, the goo began to burn. It was the most exquisitely painful thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.


	11. Coda

I remember very little of what happened next. The coat man wiped me off with some-thing (“the counteragent,” he said, “but some of the damage is done. I’m so sorry.”). I screamed, feeling the cloth he used scrape across my burning skin, but it felt a little bet-ter after that. He carried me back to the main road and hitched us a ride into town. I re-member the movement. I remember him talking to me, but I don’t remember what he said. I think I passed out at some point, and I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in a hospital bed.

The story he told the police is that I’d seen him walking and been nice enough to pick him up, since I’d met him in the diner earlier in the night. On my way to take him to his hotel, a deer’d come running out of the brush and smashed into my car- which veered out of control and rolled. The car’d caught fire, which had burned me pretty badly, but he was sitting in the back seat and he got out okay. He pulled me out of the car and carried me to safety.

If anyone ever noticed that the physical evidence didn’t match his story, they never said anything. Or maybe it did match, by the time they went and looked. I don’t know. I was in the hospital long enough that it was all cleaned up by the time I got out.

He wasn’t there when I woke up the first time, but by the time I was really conscious- instead of just drifting in and out of a morphine haze- he’d come back. He didn’t have much to say. Sorry, mostly, and that he’d see to my hospital bills. He knew my family didn’t have the money. I hadn’t thought he had money, either, but since he was a time-traveling immortal... well, work that out. It’s not hard.

It didn’t seem like him to be so quiet. Getting killed hadn’t shut him up, before, so I didn’t understand why he’d gone all silent now. Having had some time to think about it, I think he was sad about how things turned out, with his friend. I mean, if they were lovers, they must have meant something to each other, even if it wasn’t much. I wonder, too, if she wasn’t a little jealous when she attacked me like that. Maybe she thought I was her re-placement.

At the time, though, I didn’t have much more to say to him than he had to say to me. I might have told him it was okay, not his fault, I chose to be there. Then again, I might have screamed and cried and told him to get out. Maybe something in between. In any case, he visited me only once more. He told me goodbye (he had to be moving on, you see), and sorry, and he left. I never saw him again.

I still have the scars, of course. My arms are the worst; you’ve seen those. They’re hard to miss. The scars go all the way up to the shoulders, too, see? And my hands have never worked right since then. They’re stiff. From too much scar tissue, I expect. But here, too, on my neck, and the spots on my head where the hair never grew back. There’s pain, too. Burns are bad that way, even years later.

So, in some ways, I am worse off for having met Captain Jack Harkness. But, that’s not the only truth.

The day they let me out of the hospital- my skin still pink from the burns- I didn’t go home. I went to the bank, and I withdrew every penny of my college money. Then I went to the Greyhound station, and I bought a ticket for the biggest, most exciting place on the list. And I went, with nothing but the clothes on my back and that money in my pocket.

When Jack Harkness walked into the diner that day, I was living in the in-between, wanting something- anything- more than this tiny town could give me, but too frightened to go out and find it. But after he left, nothing seemed scary anymore. In a world where a man could come back to life and a time traveling alien could spit acid at you, what else could frighten me? So I went, and I found- I went and I _made_ the life I wanted.

I think most people, they’re afraid all the time, and they don’t even notice. They worry about what other people with think about them. They obsess about what people did say, and what they didn’t. They hate their jobs or their marriages or their lives, but they’re too afraid to find something new, and probably better.

I knew him for such a short time, but he taught me a new way to live. To walk without fear. To love without reservation. And always, always to keep a smile on my face, even if my world was burning down. I don’t know who I might have been in my life without meeting him, but I don’t think I’d like her near as much as the person I ended up being.

This is a story I’ve never told anyone. But I’m telling you now, because I think you need to know what I learned back then. I see you, in the same place I was then. So this is the secret you need to know, to hold in your heart against all the people who tell you to be afraid, be quiet, be still: the world is wider and stranger than you can imagine, and no one and nothing can stop you from going out and seeing it for yourself if you decide otherwise.


End file.
